Magnetic media, such as that used for hard disk drives, is traditionally made by sputtering magnetic material onto an underlying substrate. As bit densities increase and the form factor of disk drives continues to decrease, there is a need to create smaller and smaller magnetic grains. It has been found that an ion implanter may be used to reduce the size of a magnetic grain on a piece of magnetic media.
An ion implanter is used to perform ion implantation or other modifications of a workpiece. A block diagram of a conventional ion implanter is shown in FIG. 1. Of course, many different ion implanters may be used. The conventional ion implanter may comprise an ion source 102 that may be biased by a power supply 101. The system may be controlled by controller 120. The operator communicates with the controller 120 via user interface system 122. The ion source 102 is typically contained in a vacuum chamber known as a source housing (not shown). The ion implanter system 100 may also comprise a series of beam-line components through which ions 10 pass. The series of beam-line components may include, for example, extraction electrodes 104, a 90° magnet analyzer 106, a first deceleration (D1) stage 108, a 70° magnet collimator 110, and a second deceleration (D2) stage 112. Much like a series of optical lenses that manipulate a light beam, the beam-line components can manipulate and focus the ion beam 10 before steering it towards a workpiece or wafer 114, which is disposed on a workpiece support 116.
In operation, a workpiece handling robot (not shown) disposes the workpiece 114 on the workpiece support 116 that can be moved in one or more dimensions (e.g., translate, rotate, and tilt) by an apparatus, sometimes referred to as a “roplat” (not shown). Meanwhile, ions are generated in the ion source 102 and extracted by the extraction electrodes 104. The extracted ions 10 travel in a beam-like state along the beam-line components and implanted on the workpiece 114. After implanting ions is completed, the workpiece handling robot may remove the workpiece 114 from the workpiece support 116 and from the ion implanter 100.
Workpiece support 116 is typically made of a dimension conducive to efficiently processing wafer, specifically semiconductor wafers. In some embodiments, the workpiece support is suited for 300 mm outer diameter (OD) wafers. In addition, ion implanters are also optimized for one-sided processes, where only one surface is treated.
In contrast, magnetic media is much smaller, typically about 65 mm OD. In addition, magnetic media is treated on both top and bottom surfaces. These differences in requirements make the use of traditional ion implanters inefficient in the processing of magnetic media.
Therefore, it would be beneficial if there were an apparatus and method to processing magnetic media efficiently using ion implanters, which may have been designed primarily for semiconductor processing.